The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence
by A.W. Barnes
Bucknell University Press
126 pages, $24.95
IN OCTOBER 1993, the body of Mike Barnes, a lawyer for Morgan Stanley, was found in a hotel room in Manhattan. Mike had ended his own life. His brother Andrew or “A.W.,” who has written this powerful memoir, was 29 years old at the time. In the years since then, A.W. has wrestled not only with his brother’s suicide but also with his relationship, or lack of one, with his family (other than his mother), and especially with his father. “I blamed my father for Mike’s death. I still do,” he writes. What’s more, he has not been able to forgive his father.
In the years that have passed since Mike’s death, A.W. has also been hard-pressed to remove the ghost of his brother from his life. Nor does he really want to. Through various documents related to Mike’s death—police records, autopsy reports, and the like—the author invites us to walk with him as he explores what it meant to grow up as one of two gay sons who never really knew about each other’s gayness until later in life, and what it meant to grow up in “a good Catholic family” in the Midwest with seven brothers. Above all, he asks us to consider what it was like to grow up with a father who viewed any hint of homosexuality as deviant, sinful, unnatural, and so on. “My father, a good Catholic, believes that the same angels that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah also took Mike’s life.” Death is the just punishment for being a queer. “In my father’s eyes, it [Mike’s suicide] was the price that had to be paid for such a sin.”
A.W. and Mike might, one would think, have leaned on one another once they discovered that they shared such an important part of their lives. The portrait A.W. paints of his brother, however, is that of a man who, while embracing the “sexual” of homosexuality, was never comfortable with being gay, i.e. with embracing a gay identity. The two never talked about it while growing up. A.W. was aware of his otherness by the time he was nine, and when he was on the cusp of becoming a teenager, he “wanted to do more than stare at other boys.”
By the age of sixteen, A.W. was turning tricks with older men in parking lots and mall bathrooms and becoming “an expert at keeping secrets … of hiding in plain sight.” He was well aware that his father viewed homosexuality as disgusting and sinful and learned from his older brother Tony that “boys who like looking at boys were perverts.” Against this backdrop, he and his gay brother Mike never talked about it, never confiding in each other or recognizing their shared secret. “I’ve often wondered,” Barnes writes, “how my life would be different had I known that I had a gay brother.” Even after Mike outed himself and A.W. to their mother in a letter, the two did not talk about being gay. “We were brothers, but we were never gay brothers.” A.W. didn’t know Mike was HIV-positive either—not until he was told this by a police officer after the suicide.
What’s more captivating than his relationship with his brother is A.W’s connection with his father. It’s almost as if, by setting out on this journey to understand Mike and his suicide, prompted in part by his therapist, A.W. is led to look at the even more basic relationship between a father and son, in this case between a father and a gay son: “The weight of our upbringing was difficult to carry. … Even now … I feel a tightening in my chest when I think of my father.” (Writes Pat Conroy in The Lords of Discipline: “How many humans have died because sons wanted to prove themselves worthy of their fathers?”)
A.W. has never heard his dead brother’s name come from the lips of his father, not even after all these years. His father is now old and frail and suffering from COPD. A.W. reflects on a visit: “I also realized that our conversation, for my father, was a kind of affection … this was the most affection I’d ever get from him.”
Barnes continues to be troubled over whether he somehow failed his brother. He still grieves, but he has gained enough perspective to grieve with self-understanding. He still feels a sense of betrayal when he contemplates his brother’s final communication, a note found in the hotel room, because it seems as if his brother is disavowing his gayness. Despite that, when he thinks about Mike, he’s able to tell himself, in defiance of his brother’s final act: “It’s good to be alive.” His reflections on his father, however, are another matter. “I should have forgiven him but I’ve chosen not to forgive. I could’ve loved him, but I’ve chosen not to.”
Three lesser but noteworthy individuals in the memoir are Nikki, Mike’s Italian friend who is chased by her own demons; the author’s mother, whose love has been a constant factor in his life; and his husband David, with whom he lives in New York. Their contributions to the story as countervailing forces to his father and Mike cannot be overlooked.
The author is currently working on another project, “My Father’s Body,” which he described in an interview with Broad Street magazine as an “attempt to reconcile with my father, not by trying to get him to accept responsibility for the way Mike and I were raised, or to acknowledge his part in Mike’s death, but rather by trying to accept those parts of me that resemble my father or that I inherited from him.”
The book’s structure as a series of essays and Barnes’ unencumbered language make this shortish book a breezy read. The subject matter, however—the exploration of death, family history, and the discovery of self—are not so easy; but they are necessary.
David Gillespie, officially retired, teaches religion and philosophy at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.
